While segregation remained a regrettable fact of American military life during the Second World War, many African Americans still managed to distinguish themselves on the battlefield and in the air, thanks to the efforts of three women. Mary McLeod Bethune lobbied President Roosevelt successfully to open training programs at several notable historically black universities and colleges. Willa Beatrice Brown (1906–1992), one of only about 100 licensed black pilots in the nation, the overwhelming majority of whom were male, organized Chicago’s National Airmen’s Association in 1937 to promote interest in black aviation (already sparked by the black aviators who had gone to battle against Italy in Ethiopia in 1935). Eleanor Roosevelt also became involved at the urging of both Bethune and Brown and secured funding from the Rosenwald Fund, long a supporter of projects designed to improve race relations, to expand Tuskegee Institute’s pilot-training program.7 The black pilots of the 99th Pursuit Squadron—known as the Tuskegee Airmen—and Benjamin O. Davis, Sr. (1877–1970), who became the U.S. Army’s first African American general in 1940, a year before the United States entered the war, were among those who broke barriers and achieved notable military success. Despite the persistence of segregation, black men and women served with distinction.
Overseas, among the general populace, black soldiers were treated with the respect traditionally bestowed upon men (and today, women) in uniform. Race relations in Europe simply weren’t as fraught with tension as they were at home in America, for the simple reason that a much smaller percentage of black people lived in England and France than in the United States, and because neither country had a system of plantation slavery within its borders, although both had extensive colonial holdings whose economies were defined through plantation slavery, such as Jamaica and Saint-Domingue (Haiti), among many others. Once the war ended, however, black veterans returned home to a hostile and unwelcoming nation, despite the proud service record of many African American soldiers and airmen. Seven of these black men would be awarded the Medal of Honor, but only by President Bill Clinton in 1997 after an investigation conducted by scholars at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, into patterns of racial discrimination in the issuance of the award—another sign of the anti-black racism that persisted during the war.
One soldier who was determined to change things was Damon Keith (b. 1922), a native Detroiter who lived through the Belle Isle Riots and went on to become a leader of the Civil Rights Commission in Detroit and eventually a federal judge. He was inspired to go to law school by his experience in World War II, both as a soldier and as a veteran. Born on July 4, 1922, Keith was the grandson of slaves and the first of his five siblings to attend college. This had been his autoworker father’s dream: to see a child of his receive a higher education. Drafted after he completed his undergraduate years at the historically black West Virginia State College, Keith served in the Army, where, like nearly every other African American soldier, he was relegated to the lowest ranks. His commanding officer, a white Alabamian, was brutal, seizing every opportunity to belittle and demean the black soldiers under his command.
Keith had experienced his share of racism in Detroit, and now he faced it in the Army as well. This was not exactly a surprise. It was his return from the war, however, that strengthened his resolve to take an active role in the fight for civil rights. “When I came back from Europe, and we were riding in the back of the buses while German soldiers in the southern states were riding on buses [up front] and going into eating places and movies and things like that,” Keith recalled, “Tommie [Newsome, a friend and law student] said, ‘Can you imagine us just coming back from Europe fighting for democracy, and the people we were fighting against, whom we’ve captured, are now enjoying all the benefits of a democracy only because they are white?’”8
Keith left the Army as a staff sergeant in 1946 and enrolled in Howard Law School, convinced that the law was the best way to effect social change. And indeed, it would be through a brilliant legal strategy, designed by the Howard Law School dean Charles Hamilton Houston (1895–1950) and executed by his best student and chief lieutenant, Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993), that this strategy would prove to be effective in dismantling de jure segregation, culminating in the famous Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954, the decision that reversed the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision, after a string of other victories in the courts.
In the postwar era, the law was still most certainly not on the side of African Americans, and this was painfully evident on southern buses. During the war, historian Glenda Gilmore noted, gas rationing and consequent overcrowding had turned southern buses into battlefields themselves, as many black soldiers refused to be “Jim Crowed.” After the war, that conflict became even more volatile and sometimes erupted into shocking violence.
On February 12, 1946, Army veteran Sergeant Isaac Woodard (1919–1992) was returning home to his family on a Greyhound bus after being honorably discharged and winning an Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with One Star, which he wore on his uniform. In South Carolina, local law enforcement officials pulled him off the bus for asking the bus driver to make an unscheduled rest stop. He was beaten so severely by a policeman with a nightstick that he was left blind for the rest of his life. He was only 27 years old.
Woodard’s sacrifice proved to be a necessary catalyst, leading to a profound change. The NAACP seized on the incident, and it garnered national attention, especially in the wake of other lynchings of black veterans that same year. Whites and blacks reacted with outrage to Woodard’s abuse. National protests and the emerging Cold War increased pressure on President Truman to address race discrimination, particularly with an upcoming presidential campaign. Hearing about the Woodard incident, Truman spoke plainly and directly: “This shit has to stop.”9 Later that year, Truman appointed a commission on civil rights. In its report, To Secure These Rights, the commission recommeded the desegregation of the armed forces at long last, anti-lynching legislation (for which Du Bois and the NAACP had been fighting since 1910), and the abolition of poll taxes. Truman would sign Executive Order 9981, issued in 1948. More than a century of agitation to desegregate the military had finally paid off.
The noted radio personality, actor, and filmmaker Orson Welles even dedicated some of his national ABC Radio broadcasts to the Woodard case and to the condemnation of the policeman, whom he called “Officer X,” after his acquittal by a local jury. “What does it cost to be a Negro?” Welles asked. “In Aiken, South Carolina, it cost a man his eyes. What does it cost to wear over your skeleton the pinkish tint officially described as white? In Aiken, South Carolina, it cost a man his soul…. Your eyes, Officer X, your eyes, remember, were not gouged away. Only the lids are closed. You might raise the lids, you might just try the wild adventure of looking, and you might see something. It might be a simple truth, one of those truths held to be self-evident by our Founding Fathers and by most of us….”10
The crime against Isaac Woodard was shocking. But so, too, was the fact that the blinding of a black soldier by a white policeman could spark national outrage. Lynchings and brutality against blacks had gone on relatively unchecked—and certainly unchallenged—for decades prior to World War II, as we saw in the case of Ida B. Wells’s friends in Memphis (described in Chapter 7). The war, however, unleashed powerful forces that helped to mobilize unprecedented pressure for equal rights for African Americans. Northern migration, increased competition for jobs and housing, limited integration of defense industry plants, increased black electoral power (a result of migration), the desegregation of the military in 1948—all of these forces combined to strengthen a movement that had been slowly gathering momentum for years, largely unnoticed by the American public. In the North, African American protests against school segregation, unfair housing, and job discrimination had been building in intensity since the 1920s. In the segregated South, church groups, black women’s clubs, civil rights activists, and progressives had been fighting against the lynching an
d beating of black men and the rape of black women. Now, the wartime changes in aspects of race relations emboldened not just activists, but ordinary individuals, too.
White-only cabs, by Warren K. Leffler, Albany, Georgia; August 18, 1962. Photograph. Library of Congress.
Two years before the Woodard beating, in 1944, a Virginia housewife named Irene Morgan (1917–2007) had been thrown off a bus and arrested for refusing to give her seat to a white rider when ordered to do so by the bus driver. Sitting in the area designated for black passengers, she did not believe she should have to surrender her seat. She is said to have resisted by tearing up the summons she was issued and kicking the arresting officer in the groin. Morgan’s action landed her in jail, and while she pleaded guilty to resisting arrest, she did not accept the charges that she had violated the state’s law of mandatory segregation on public transportation. The NAACP took her case all the way to the Supreme Court—and won. In the 1946 decision Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, the court declared that segregated seating in interstate public transportation was unconstitutional because it violated the Commerce Clause, lending momentum to the NAACP’s long, patient, and profoundly brilliant strategy of challenging Jim Crow in the courts.
The NAACP’s legal team, led by the Howard Law School dean Charles Hamilton Houston, had been seeking for years to dismantle the legal foundations of de jure segregation, brick by legal brick. But this strategy demanded immense patience and perseverance. Some activists argued that the gradualist legal strategy should be complemented by direct action to test the rulings and press for more immediate change. Hers was not a coordinated effort, but Irene Morgan, a housewife recovering from a miscarriage, had independently carried out one of the first direct actions in the nascent civil rights movement.
Ella Baker (1903–1986) was an early and influential proponent of direct action. A tireless community organizer committed to economic and racial justice, Baker constructed a national foundation for local activism that would manifest itself from the ground up, in contrast to the NAACP’s legal strategy, which was a top-down approach. In addition, Baker was a female in a movement totally dominated by male leadership with its fair share of male chauvinism and misogyny, neither of which was a stranger to her.
Baker had been an outspoken crusader for fairness even as a student at Shaw University, which she attended from 1918 to 1927. (One of the country’s first historically black colleges, the North Carolina institution was at the time a high school and a university.) Her protests against the dress code, which forbade women from wearing silk stockings, and the rule prohibiting male and female students from walking across campus together, brought no change in the school’s rules but earned her a reputation as a “troublemaker.”11 She continued to speak out, her voice fortunately having more effect in the formative years of the civil rights movement.
Ella Baker, for the NAACP, circa 1942–1946. WGBH Stock sales/Photo Scala, Florence.
As a teacher in worker education with the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s, with roots in the John Dewey philosophy of learning by doing, Baker sowed the seeds of direct action as a form of protest before it was fashionable. Starting out as an NAACP field director and then gaining the title director of branches in the mid-1940s, Baker went from town to town, city to city, throughout the North and South, conducting what were called Leadership Conferences. Her main purpose was to equip regional, grassroots people to organize and defend their own rights as citizens. Baker’s philosophy was captured by the title of her favorite hymn, which she borrowed for her organizing workshop, “Give People Light and They Will Find a Way.”12
Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum and Bayard Rustin at the National Interreligious Task Force, Tenth Anniversary Conference, 1982. Photograph. American Jewish Committee Archives. Rabbi Tanenbaum was a founder and program chair of the National Conference on Religion and Race in 1963, marking the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation; the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered the closing address. It was here that Tanenbaum introduced his mentor, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, to King, and the two would go on to march side by side in the 1965 march on Selma. Tanenbaum himself worked closely with civil rights leaders such as Andrew Young, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Sr., and the Journey of Reconciliation and March on Washington organizer Rustin.
In 1947, in response to Morgan v. Virginia, the conscientious objector and activist Bayard Rustin (1912–1987) proposed a nonviolent direct action to test compliance with the Supreme Court’s decision desegregating interstate travel. A founding member of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE)—an interracial group formed in 1942 dedicated to nonviolence as the best means of combating and defeating Jim Crow—Rustin enlisted veteran organizers to assist him, including Ella Baker. It was a most fortuitous alliance. The plan they devised was for a team of black and white activists to ride together in buses from Washington, D.C., through Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. It would be known as the Journey of Reconciliation.
In challenging Jim Crow, the organizers of the Journey of Reconciliation were simultaneously daring and cautious. They deliberately avoided the dangers of Alabama and Mississippi, where white resistance was violent and unwavering, confining their route to the Upper South. Furthermore, only men would be allowed to make the journey, concerned “that mixing the races and sexes would possibly exacerbate an already volatile situation,” which meant that Baker herself could not participate. (It was not the first time that Baker’s leadership role in the movement would be limited because of her sex, nor would it be the last. Nor could she have been pleased about it.)13
Despite their caution, four of the riders—Rustin himself and another African American, Andrew Johnson, plus CORE members Igal Roodenko and Joseph Felmet, who lived in the North—were arrested during the trip and convicted of violating state law, which still enforced intrastate segregation on buses. First Rustin and Roodenko were sentenced, in May, then a month later Johnson and Felmet. In both cases, the judge handed down a much harsher penalty to the white riders.
Judge Henry Whitfield, a hard-line segregationist … approvingly issued a guilty verdict, assessing Rustin court costs and sentencing Roodenko to thirty days on a road gang. Explaining the differential treatment, he termed Rustin “a poor misled Nigra from the North” who bore less responsibility that white agitators who should know better, and later added a dash of anti-Semitism to his admonition. “I presume you’re Jewish, Mr. Rodenky,” drawled the judge. “Well, it’s about time you Jews from New York learned that you can’t come down here bringing your nigras with you to upset the customs of the South.”14
Except for the arrests, the Journey of Reconciliation rides were largely peaceful and uneventful. For the most part, no one disputed the men’s right to ride the southern buses with whites, but neither did blacks and whites suddenly mix freely on the buses. In the end, the Journey of Reconciliation received considerable publicity and proved that nonviolent direct action could be a viable means of protest. It was a lesson that would be followed later in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, with far-reaching consequences for African Americans and the nation.
WHILE RACIAL DISCRIMINATION WAS PERCEIVED TO BE A SPECIFICALLY “AMERICAN DILEMMA,” as Gunnar Myrdal’s best-selling study of the history of American race relations put it in 1944, some leading civil rights activists focused their efforts on internationalizing the freedom struggle. Inspired by leftist politics, and especially by the growing struggle against colonialism in India, Africa, Asia, and around the globe, they attempted to mobilize international public opinion against America’s treatment of its African American citizens.
The first black actor to play Othello since the 1800s and the singer who immortalized “Ol’ Man River” now spoke words that struck a far too dissonant chord with American audiences. In the late 1940s, the popular singer, actor, and left-wing activist Paul Robeson castigated the hypocrisy of an American government that congratulated itself for victory over fascism abroad while t
olerating racial oppression at home. His inflammatory words comparing the U.S. government’s treatment of African Americans to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews brought him before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Asked whether he knew why he was called before the committee, Robeson replied: “My ancestors in the time of Washington baked bread for George Washington’s troops when they crossed the Delaware, and my own father was a slave. I stand here struggling for the rights of my people to be full citizens in this country. And they are not. They are not in Mississippi, and they are not in Montgomery, Alabama, and they are not in Washington, and they are nowhere, and that is why I am here today.”15
Paul Robeson with W. E. B. Du Bois at the Paris World Peace Conference, 1949. Photograph. W. E. B. Du Bois Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Intent on bringing international attention to America’s treatment of its black citizens, Robeson took his case to the United Nations in 1951. Following in the tradition of his predecessor, fellow traveler, and mentor W. E. B. Du Bois, Robeson addressed a petition to the new international body titled “We Charge Genocide—The Crime of Government Against the Negro People.” The petition referred to thousands of wrongful executions and lynchings, and charged that the United States was engaged in a conspiracy against its black citizens by restricting their right to vote with poll taxes and literacy tests. While Du Bois and other prominent activists endorsed the petition, the charge of genocide was considered too extreme by many white liberals—and by much of the black establishment as well.
Robeson’s efforts to mobilize international condemnation of American racism turned him into a pariah, as did his sympathy with Soviet communism and Stalinism during the heyday of McCarthyism. Lionized across Europe, he was repeatedly investigated in his homeland and finally ostracized. The U.S. government revoked Robeson’s passport (as it did Du Bois’s and many other Americans’ accused of being “un-American”), effectively sidelining him and for all intents and purposes ending his career as a stage performer. In 1958, the year the Supreme Court ordered the reinstatement of Robeson’s (and Du Bois’s) passport as the result of a class-action suit, he published his auto-biography, Here I Stand.
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